West Tennessee and the Fast Food Strike

I spent a lot of time this weekend reading and thinking about John Branch’s two-part story about a basketball program for teenage girls at a school run by the Carroll County Juvenile Court in West Tennessee. (Side note: Branch became infamous for his Pulitzer Prize-winning story “Snow Fall,” which caused a lot of other news organizations to mimic its long-form multimedia storytelling when it was often unnecessary to do so.)

Branch’s reporting covers a myriad of issues: What it’s like to grow up in a town plagued by things like unemployment, substance abuse, racism, and teenage pregnancy. Hannah, the 14-year-old teenager profiled in the story, bounces around from one relative’s home to another, partly because her parents are in jail for drug abuse, and partly because she said a cousin kicked her out of the house for messaging a “dude who was a different color” than she is. She’s also told to prepare herself for waiting tables, working in fast food restaurants, or cleaning motel rooms, because as her cousin tells her, “there’s nothing else for women to do around here.”

The story is long at a little over 11,000 words, but you should definitely take the time to see the 17-minute documentary that accompanies it.

One of the things that struck me while reading the piece was how desperate the teenagers in the story were to rise out of their unlucky circumstances. Nearly all of them talked about applying to every fast food restaurant in town looking for work since nearly all of the other businesses and factories had closed. Some wanted to get out of town to look for better opportunities, but had no means of doing so.

Branch’s story provides more context into the fast food strikes by workers demonstrating against low wages and lack of union representation in the fast food industry, which Josh Eidelson deftly covers in his story today for Salon. There are places in this country where the only opportunities around for some people are working in a fast food restaurant, or cleaning a motel room, and if wages are too low, the opportunity to rise out of difficult situations is just that much harder.

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